Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Desktop Remote Control – A new option?

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It can be trying and difficult providing technical support to friends or family members remotely in this COVID-19 reality. A good desktop remote control solution can really make the difference between helping to resolve a problem or everyone walking away extremely frustrated.

I recently had to assist my 75 year old father with an issue he was having and it was a struggle to get through the “Buy Now” banner ad that was popping up from Teamviewer. I probably use Teamviewer 1-2 times a month for 20-30 minutes so I can’t justify dropping $49/monthly on that solution. So I did what any techie would do and I took to Google in search of a new solution.

I stumbled across a solution called AweSun by AweRay. I’ve never heard about AweRay so I dug a little deeper and found the domain name was registered in May 2019 and their first news release was in April 2020. So they are a fairly new player in the space from what I could learn. I also noticed that their infrastructure is housed in Google Cloud Platform.

I’ve spent a few days with the solution and it worked really well. I was able to quickly and easily connect to my parents computer using their Device ID and Passcode very similar to how Teamviewer works. The product also supports copying clipboard data between the local computer and the computer you are remote controlling, so you can cut and paste between computers with ease. When I rebooted my parents computer AweSun properly started itself back up and allowed me to remotely connect after the reboot without any issues or problems.

Looking through their pricing and features list it seems like the “free” version is extremely functional.

The pricing is definitely much better than many of the competing solutions on the market. Obviously you can’t beat free, but even at $9/month – it’s definitely feasible to throw the company some business for a month or two in order to support the product without breaking your wallet.

I’m curious if anyone else has tested AweSun?

Cheers!

Desktop Build Fails – Time for Upgrade

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In November I got a call from my parents that the desktop I built for them back in 2014 was not booting up. After talking my father through opening the case and sending me some video, it appeared that the case and CPU fans would start but then stop, only to start again and then stop again, rinse and repeat over and over. I had seen this symptom before and thought the issue might be with the power supply so I ordered a new EVGA 500W power supply and had it shipped to their house. Kudos to my 70 year old father for replacing the power supply by himself, unfortunately the problem persisted so that likely meant that the motherboard had failed, although the motherboard looked fine and there were no obvious failed capacitors or other damage.

That machine had lasted them six years, so that was a pretty good investment in my honest opinion and I could likely reuse the case, power supply, CPU and memory from that computer on other builds or projects my daughters were working on. In the end I decided to just build them a new machine, swapping the SSD from their old machine, this way there would be minimal change to them. All their email and shortcuts would be there, all the software would be the same, the icons would all be in the “right” place. It would just make things super simple for them as the user, especially since both of my parents are in their 70s.

I went and ordered a bunch of new components to build them a new machine.

With the help of my youngest daughter we assembled the the pieces of the new machine and then tested that everything was working properly using a spare SSD that I had available.

My parents brought the old machine over to my house, I removed the SSD and installed it into the new machine, cleaned up some of the drivers, installed a new Windows 10 license key (OEM version would not re-activate) and they were back up and running with minimal fuss to them.

Let’s see how long that machine lasts them.

Cheers!

Home Desktop Upgrade 2017

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I honestly wasn’t planing a desktop upgrade, but you know what happens when hardware dies… time for an upgrade.

Unfortunately the wife’s computer recently died so I gave her my desktop (swapping SSDs and hard drives) and went about putting together a new desktop for myself from the following purchases;

I decided to stay with Intel for now and passed on AMD Ryzen and Threadripper. I also decided that I’d be more than happy with an Intel Core i7 series processor, no need to look at the recently released Intel Core i9 processors. I did decide that the old Antec P180 case needed to be put into the scrap pile so I ordered a Corsair Crystal Series 570X RGB case. Since I swapped the SSDs and hard drives I ran into the dreaded Windows activation issue since the original product keys were OEM versions. I didn’t want to go through the time and effort of re-installing Windows 10 so I purchased 2 retail copies of Windows 10 Professional and applied those product keys. While the hardware supports overclocking, I’ll probably run it at stock until I need more performance or I find the time to start testing the overclocking potential of the hardware.

Now I need to spend sometime finding a replacement for Crashplan. Any recommendations?

Cheers!

Home Desktop Upgrade 2016

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It’s pretty funny how I actually find these posts pretty entertaining to myself… going back and looking at all the desktop upgrades I’ve gone through over the years.

In any case I thought it was high past time to give Windows 10 a spin so I went out and purchased a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD. I did this so I could clone my 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD, providing me a very simple backout plan if I didn’t like Windows 10 or something went terribly wrong. I fired up Clonzilla Live via a USB flash drive and quickly cloned the 256GB SSD to the 512GB SSD. I installed the 512GB SSD and put the 256GB SSD in a safe pace. The computer booted up to Windows 7 fine on the new SSD and I upgraded to Windows 10 with no problems or issues. Fast forward almost four months later and I’m pretty happy with the upgrade. I’m not sure I gained a whole lot from a technical standpoint. Windows 7 had worked pretty well for me the past few years and I suspect Windows 10 will do the same but if the upgrade hadn’t been free I’m not sure I would have made the jump myself.  About four weeks ago I upgraded my Lenovo T430 to Windows 10 without issue. It helps that I replaced the hard drive with an SSD about a year ago.

Windows 10 is a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users until July 29, 2016 so time is running short.

Have you made the jump to Windows 10? At Home? At Work?

Cheers!

Home Desktop Upgrade 2013

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antec_p280It’s been a while since I upgraded my primary desktop machine so I thought it was time to spend a little coin. While I did install a SSD back in August 2012 I thought it was time for a completely new machine. When I get a new machine I usually pass my old one down to the wife and then her old machine to the kids and so on this way everyone has a little something to be excited about. This time around I decided to splurge and go for what I would probably consider a fairly high-end build. I also ordered a new case and power supply so I could have both machines running at the same time and could take my time migrating the data and content from the old machine to the new machine.

Here’s what I purchased from NewEgg;

I thought about going with water cooling but eventually decided to stick with air cooling and purchased the Zalman CNPS9900ALED .The Zalman heatsink is insanely huge, words just don’t do it justice. While the Antec P280 case is fairly large itself, the Zalman heatsink quickly fills the case making it look small. Thankfully everything arrived within a few days of ordering it and it took me about 2 days to assemble the new machine. I performed the assembly in the following order;

  1. Install Corsair power supply into Antec P280 case
  2. Install G.Skill memory onto Gigabyte motherboard
  3. Install Intel Core i7 CPU onto Gigabyte motherboard
  4. Install Zalman heatsink onto Intel Core i7 CPU and Gigabyte motherboard
  5. Install Gigabyte motherboard into case
  6. Install Samsung 840 SSD into case
  7. Install Western Digital hard drive into case
  8. Install MSI 6950 video card into Gigabyte motherboard and case
  9. Wire everything together, including all power leads, front panel LEDs, USB headers, SATA connectors, etc.

The hardest part was figuring out how to mount the Zalman CPU heatsink which probably took about 20-35 minutes. Thankfully everything was working right out of the box and I had no DoAs or RMAs to contend with. Obviously I stayed with Windows 7 64-bit having heard all about the issues with Windows 8.

That leaves me with the following build;

  • Windows 7 Service Pack 1 64-bit
  • Intel Core i7-3370K @3.5Ghz
  • 16GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 2133 memory (4 sticks)
  • Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H motherboard
  • MSI R6950 Twin Frozr II OC Radeon HD 6950 2GB
  • 256GB Samsung 840 Pro Series SSD
  • 2TB Western Digital Black SATA 3 hard disk
  • LITE-ON Blue Ray DVD burner
  • Antec P280 case
  • CORSAIR HX Series HX850 power supply
  • Logitech G15 keyboard
  • Logitech G5 mouse
  • Logitech C910 webcam
  • 2 x ASUS 27″ LCD display
  • Canon i2600 InkJet Printer

Cheers!

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